49 Fun Facts About Norfolk

Which condiment has Colman's of Norwich milled since Jeremiah Colman set up at Stoke Holy Cross mill in 1814?

Mustard got its Colman's tang from a blend of brown and white seeds, and the firm outgrew its watermill, moving to a huge works at Carrow in Norwich that ran for 160 years.

Which comedian plays Alan Partridge, the Norwich radio host who lives in a roadside hotel pitching TV ideas?

Steve Coogan first voiced Partridge in 1991 as the hapless sports reporter on the Radio 4 news spoof On the Hour, and the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge later won two BAFTAs.

Which birds did Bernard Matthews rear in the 35 rooms of Great Witchingham Hall, later selling them on TV as 'Bootiful'?

Turkeys hatched in the dining room while Matthews and his wife lived in two unheated rooms of the hall. His own 1980 advert put the Norfolk-accented 'Bootiful' into the national consciousness.

Which Dickens novel uses Great Yarmouth as a key setting and has it called 'the finest place in the universe'?

David Copperfield gives the line to the hero's nurse Peggotty as she brings him to the town; Dickens stayed at the Royal Hotel on Yarmouth's Marine Parade while working on the novel.

How were clocks set under 'Sandringham time', introduced by Edward VII to lengthen shooting days?

Half an hour ahead of GMT stayed the rule under George V, until Edward VIII, on becoming king in 1936, ordered the estate's clocks put back to Greenwich time.

Norwich Castle's Norman keep served what purpose from 1220 until 1887, seven years before it became a museum?

A gaol, or prison, filled the keep for more than 650 years, and in the 1790s the architect John Soane had its inner walls taken out to fit in cells for the felons.

Which north Norfolk village has Britain's only independently run lighthouse, East Anglia's oldest still working?

Happisburgh's light was marked for closure by Trinity House in the late 1980s, but villagers campaigned to save it and a 1990 Act of Parliament set up their own trust to run it.

Despite its name, Wells-next-the-Sea in north Norfolk now sits roughly how far from the North Sea after silting?

About a mile of marsh and a confined channel now separate the town from open water, after a mile-long bank built in 1859 reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh.

Which Norfolk resort, unusually for a town on England's east coast, has a seafront facing west across The Wash?

Hunstanton's westward outlook gives it a sight rare on England's east coast, the sun setting over the sea, and its beach cliffs are striped red and white.

Which BBC sitcom shot its exteriors in Thetford, whose buildings doubled for the seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea?

Dad's Army shot most of its outdoor scenes on the Army's Stanford training area beside the town, and Thetford now keeps a museum to the show in part of its Guildhall.

Which political radical, active in both the American and French revolutions, was born in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737?

Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense argued for American independence and whose Rights of Man answered Edmund Burke, is commemorated by a statue in Thetford.

Norwich City's nickname honours the local history of breeding which bird, perched on a ball in the club badge?

Canary breeding was a local passion, and by 1907 the Canaries had replaced the club's first nickname, the Citizens, as light blue and white shirts gave way to yellow.

In the 1993–94 UEFA Cup, Norwich City became the only English club to win at the Olympiastadion against which side?

Bayern Munich lost 2–1 to Norwich in the club's only European campaign, which ended a round later against Inter Milan.

Which University of East Anglia building, designed by Norman Foster, appears in Avengers: Age of Ultron?

The Sainsbury Centre also hosted scenes for Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, all shot in the mid-2010s.

Which prison reformer, born into Norwich's Quaker Gurney family in 1780, was on the Bank of England £5 note until 2017?

Elizabeth Fry was horrified to find women and children crammed into Newgate Prison in 1813 and later funded a school for the children held there; her girlhood home, Earlham Hall, now belongs to the University of East Anglia.

Which Swardeston-born nurse was executed in occupied Belgium in 1915 for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape?

Edith Cavell treated wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination, and her grave lies in the grounds of Norwich Cathedral.

Anna Sewell, born in Great Yarmouth in 1820, wrote which novel about a horse, the only book she ever published?

Black Beauty was written, its author said, to induce kindness to horses; a Norwich publisher bought the copyright outright, and she died at Old Catton within months of its release.

Which sports-car maker founded by Colin Chapman moved in 1966 to Hethel, a former airfield in Norfolk?

Lotus laid out its Hethel test track on sections of RAF Hethel's wartime runway.

Norwich Union, the insurer founded in 1797, merged with CGU in 2000 into a group renamed what in 2002?

Aviva was an invented palindrome adopted by shareholder vote in April 2002, replacing the clumsy merger name CGNU plc.

Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving English book by a woman, lived as what?

An anchoress lived in permanent seclusion, and Julian's cell was attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich, where the mystic Margery Kempe came to seek her counsel.

Which Wymondham landowner led the 1549 rebels who camped on Mousehold Heath and seized Norwich over land enclosures?

Robert Kett began as a target: rebels came to tear down his own enclosure fences, but instead of resisting he agreed with them and offered to lead the rising.

What did 16th-century Norwich call the Dutch and Flemish Protestant refugees who became a third of its population?

The Strangers fled Catholic persecution, with the people of Ypres in particular choosing Norwich, and the city's Strangers' Hall keeps the name.

What was dug from Grime's Graves, the complex of Neolithic mine shafts in Norfolk's Breckland near Brandon?

Flint was the toolmaker's raw material, shaped into axes and arrowheads, and it stayed so cheap beside metal that mining may have carried on into the Bronze and Iron Ages.

What stood at the centre of Seahenge, the Bronze Age timber circle on Holme beach that the press named in 1998?

An inverted oak stump sat inside a ring of timbers felled in 2049 BC, when the site was surrounded by salt marsh rather than sea.

Which Iron Age objects, over 150 in gold and other alloys, make up Norfolk's Snettisham Hoard, found from 1948?

Torcs, the Iron Age neck rings, came out of the ground in more than 150 pieces; French coins buried with them date the hoard to about 70 BC, and its quality suggests royal treasure of the Iceni.

King's Lynn keeps England's only surviving warehouse of which medieval trading alliance?

The Hanseatic League dominated North Sea trade when Lynn ranked among England's most important ports, and Hanse House, its warehouse, still stands on the town's South Quay.

George Vancouver, born in King's Lynn in 1757, first went to sea as a boy under which famous captain?

James Cook took him on his second and third voyages, and Vancouver returned in the 1790s in command of his own expedition, charting the Pacific coast where a Canadian city now bears his name.

Which resort, signposted 'Gem of the Norfolk Coast', has a lifeboat station on its pier and a brown crab named after it?

Cromer's crab fishery is the main income of its fishermen, and the pier also carries the Pavilion Theatre.

Howard Carter, who opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, spent much of his childhood in which Norfolk market town?

Swaffham was his parents' home town, and Howard Carter, a sickly child, was sent there from London to be raised by relatives.

Which queen, mother of Edward III, lived at Castle Rising in Norfolk after her fall from power in 1330?

Isabella of France extended the castle buildings and kept a regal lifestyle there, entertaining her son on several occasions.

Blickling Hall, the Jacobean National Trust house in Norfolk, stands on an estate held around 1500 by which family?

The Boleyns held Blickling when Anne Boleyn was probably born there, about 1501; the house she knew is gone, and the present one went up after 1616 and passed to the National Trust in 1940.

Which Norfolk house, commissioned in 1722 by Robert Walpole, is a key building in English Neo-Palladian architecture?

Houghton Hall once held Walpole's great picture collection, until his grandson sold it to Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779 to pay off the estate's debts.

Which Palladian house near Norfolk's north coast was home to Thomas Coke, the agrarian reformer 'Coke of Norfolk'?

Holkham Hall was built by an earlier Thomas Coke; the reformer, his great-nephew and heir, went on to enlarge its park to more than 3,000 acres.

Thetford Forest, planted after the First World War as a timber reserve, is Britain's largest forest of which kind?

Lowland pine went into the Breckland sands because the war had consumed so many of the country's oaks and other slow-growing trees.

Which lake on the Norfolk waterways, slightly brackish from its nearness to the sea, has the largest surface area?

Hickling Broad's calm water made it a First World War refuge for naval seaplanes, which could put down there when the sea off Great Yarmouth was too rough.

Which animals gather in a large colony at the tip of Blakeney Point, the shingle spit on Norfolk's north coast?

Seals of two kinds share the colony: harbour seal pups, born in summer, can swim almost at once, while grey seal pups, born in winter, stay on land until they shed their white coats.

The Peddars Way, a 46-mile path across Norfolk to the coast at Holme-next-the-Sea, follows the line of what?

A Roman road gave the route its line, though more than one writer argues it began as an older trackway the Romans merely adopted.

Which two-word motto belongs to the University of East Anglia, founded in Norwich in 1963 to designs by Denys Lasdun?

Do Different is the motto of a campus whose first plans Lasdun, a 'New Brutalist', unveiled at a press conference in April 1963.

Which 1998 Booker Prize winner studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia in the course's first years?

Ian McEwan was followed on the course by Kazuo Ishiguro, MA 1980, who went on to win both the Booker and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Norwich Cathedral's Norman walls are faced with cream limestone shipped from which French city?

Caen stone was shipped up the River Wensum, and the builders cut a canal so that the loads could be landed beside the site.

Which client king of Rome, Boudica's husband, willed his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman emperor?

Prasutagus ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome, and when his will was ignored and the kingdom annexed, Boudica's revolt followed.

Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk, famed for its carved west front, belonged to which order, a Benedictine reform?

Cluniac monks came to Castle Acre from Lewes, where the Warenne family had founded the order's first English house, and the flamboyant west front is typical of Cluniac taste.

Which wader with an upcurved bill, the RSPB's emblem, breeds on islands at its Titchwell Marsh reserve in Norfolk?

The avocet had died out as a British breeding bird by 1840, and its return to breed in Suffolk in 1947 led the RSPB to adopt it as its logo.

Which Norfolk coxswain, the RNLI's most decorated lifeboatman, has a museum in the Rocket House beside a pier?

Henry Blogg served the lifeboats for 53 years, launching 387 times and helping to rescue 873 people, and his museum is built around the lifeboat H F Bailey III.

The Nest, Norwich City's cramped home until Carrow Road went up in 82 days, was squeezed into a disused what?

A chalk pit made The Nest a hazard, its pitch hemmed in by a concrete wall holding up a cliff, and in 1935 the FA ruled it unfit for big crowds, forcing the dash to build Carrow Road.

In which 2013 film does Alan Partridge turn negotiator after a sacked DJ, played by Colm Meaney, takes hostages?

Alpha Papa had its premiere in July 2013 at the Hollywood Cinema in Norwich's Anglia Square, after a shoot split between the city and Mitcham.

The heritage North Norfolk Railway from Sheringham to Holt via Weybourne takes its nickname from which flower?

Poppy Line trains run close to the coast a London journalist christened 'Poppyland' in 1883, for the poppies that grew along its lanes and meadows.

The Norfolk wherry, a few of which survive restored on the Broads, was traditionally what kind of vessel?

A cargo boat with one tall sail, the trading wherry lost its freight to the railways, so owners refitted some to carry holidaymakers around the Broads instead.

Which kind of road does Norfolk lack entirely, making it one of the few English counties without one?

A motorway has never reached Norfolk, and only two routes from the west give the county a direct link to the A1.